Reliance Industries invests Rs 700 crore in AI start-up Haptik Infotech

Introduction

Reliance Industries (RIL) said on Wednesday its subsidiary Reliance Jio Digital Services had entered into a strategic transaction with Haptik Infotech, a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform that will build India's largest AI assistant company across chat, voice and regional languages.

The company said the transaction size (including investment for growth and expansion) is estimated to be Rs 700 crore, with Rs 230 crore as the consideration for the initial business transfer.

“The Haptik team will continue to drive growth of the business, including the enterprise platform as well as digital consumer assistants. On a fully-diluted basis, Reliance will hold close to 87 per cent of the business, with the rest being held by the Haptik founders and employees through stock option grants,” the firm said.

This transaction enables Jio to leverage Haptik's capabilities across various devices and touch points. The focus is on enhancement and expansion of the platform, with an addressable market opportunity of over a billion users. This partnership will also give a boost to Haptik's existing enterprise grade business, with the firm continuing to build innovative AI solutions for corporates globally.

Akash Ambani, director of Jio, said: “This strategic investment underlines our commitment to further boost the digital ecosystem and provide users conversational AI-enabled devices with multi-lingual capabilities.”

Vaish and Swapan Rajdev founded Haptik in 2013, as a chat-based virtual concierge mobile app. Over the past two years, the focus has been on tech enhancement.

Source

Business Standard , 04 April 2019